Quantity is an attribute of a set of objects and we use numbers to name specific quantities.

Understanding of numerosity is central to number sense development. When children gain deeper knowledge of this Big Idea, they know that when number words are used to name “how many,” they describe amount, just as “red” describes color, and “hot” describes temperature.

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Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this understanding number sense, and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.

Children like big numbers! Often before they can say all the numbers from one to one hundred reliably, children understand that one hundred is a lot. They quickly learn that one thousand is even more and one million even more than that.

Ellen Stoll Walsh’s book Mouse Count can be used in the classroom to cover such broad-ranging topics as data analysis, number sense, and number and operations. Key concepts such as estimation can be explored and investigated.